Really Steam? Really?!

A Blog Post for Steam

I'm a poor motherfucker who unfortunately enjoys playing video games very much. I'm saying unfortunate, not because I don't want to like them, but because most of the time I cannot afford them.

So every time a sale like the current one comes, I get all excited and eager to get those games I've been saving all year for. And even though 20 euros aren't much (1 mid-prized game is usually this much) at the time of discounts you can actually get around 5-7 games with that budget.

So I placed my games in the shopping cart, all fine and dandy still, and clicked to purchase for myself. Selected a payment method and.. what's that? Ah, right. The steam wallet inserted itself into the transaction without me selecting it, as usual. So I selected the little "change" button next to it in the brackets and bam! An error message!"You have an unfinished purchase from before" it said "can't let you continue with this one". I was standing there in confusion. What unfinished purchase? I mean besides the one I was doing at that moment, there's no other unfinished purchase. So I tried a few things like refreshing the page, going back and reconfirming payment mehod. Trying from both browser and steam client. No, it insisted that I cannot proceed and blocked me from doing anything in the shop for a while.

So naturally, I tried to contact the steam support and naturally their stupid ticket system didn't have anything remotely resembling my problem. It took me ages to find a way to actually write them an e-mail. Unlike other companies' support system, they've gone to great lengths to make that option as hard to reach as possible.

By this point, I had already lost my patience, but I'm thinking "hey now that you've contacted a person it shouldn't take long".After a day I got a reply and... it was a bot response. You know- the type where they tell you shit that you already know and it was like microsoft sam had written it. Last words were "if you still encounter any problems try to send us screenshots and we'll get back to you as soon as possible".

OF COURSE I STILL ENCOUNTERED PROBLEMS, YOU DIDN"T HELP ME AT ALL!

So I wrote them again, putting a shit load of screenshots along the text, so that even the simplest of minds can grasp it. Aand....they never got back to me again.

Really Steam, really? A multi million dollar company can't manage an adequate support system? Sure makes it seems like they only see wallets in their customers and not actual people! That's the shit I'd expect from EA not Valve.

Anyways, after waiting a few days, I gave up and made the order for the games again, this time not messing with the payment methods, which meant I had to surrender all the funds I had in the wallet.

Why is this a big deal again?

Using the steam wallet for games is something I don't like to do, as I only use it for community market deals, cause it's really hard to put funds in it and whatever I did have in there was from inventory items I'd sold on the market. Prior to now I'd never encountered this issue. I could always remove the steam wallet from the purchse just fine and use only external resources, but not this time.

Well, i got the games at least and I'll probably forget it in a week, but it sure left a bitter taste to what was supposed to be me enjoying the new games I saved all year for without anything screwing up.

They had censored my name ("Arman") on the Steam platform, so whenever I look at my name on, for example a Workshop submission, I see hearts instead of "Arman". After contacting them I got a reply that they have no plans on changing that. That's how awesome they are.

Lesson learned: Don't bother contacting companies that care about $$$ only instead of actually helping the community. If they are not willing to make a simple change in their system or at least explain why the word "arman" is considered a rude one, then there's nothing special to expect from them.

Oh, wow! A few minutes ago the support replied with "hey we've noticed you went with the purchase and used your steam wallet funds, so problem solved! If you wanna, you can bitch about it in the steam suggestions/ideas forum, bye now!"